November 28, 2010

Gas locked inside Siberia's frozen soil and under its lakes has been seeping out since the end of the last ice age 10,000 years ago. But in the past few decades, as the Earth has warmed, the icy ground has begun thawing more rapidly, accelerating the release of methane — a greenhouse gas 23 times more powerful than carbon dioxide — at a perilous rate. The thawing of permafrost could become the epicenter of climate change. 1.5 trillion tons of carbon, locked inside icebound earth since the age of mammoths, is a climate time bomb waiting to explode if released into the atmosphere. Total carbon storage here is like all the rain forests of our planet put together. Global warming is amplified in the polar regions. What feels like a modest temperature rise is enough to induce Greenland glaciers to retreat, Arctic sea ice to thin and contract in summer, and permafrost to thaw faster, both on land and under the seabed. Yet awareness of methane leaks from permafrost is so new that it was not even mentioned in the seminal 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which warned of rising sea levels inundating coastal cities, dramatic shifts in rainfall disrupting agriculture and drinking water, the spread of diseases, and the extinction of species. Studies indicate that cold-country dynamics on climate change are complex. The Arctic Monitoring and Assessment Program, a scientific body set up by the eight Arctic rim countries, says overall the Arctic is absorbing more carbon dioxide than it releases. But Methane is a different story according to their 2009 report. The Arctic is responsible for up to 9 percent of global methane emissions. Other methane sources include landfills, livestock, and fossil fuel production. In some places, so much methane is leaking from holes in the sediment at the bottom of one lake that “on some days it looked like the lake is boiling," according to Katey Walter Anthony of the University of Alaska Fairbanks who has been measuring methane seeps in Arctic lakes in Alaska, Canada, and Russia for 10 years. More than 50 billion tons could be unleashed from Siberian lakes alone, more than 10 times the amount now in the atmosphere.

November 21, 2010

An analysis by the Salt Lake Tribune of campaign-disclosure forms shows that 33 of the 100 incoming legislators who reported raising money this year (four did not report any donations) did not collect any money from their local constituents. Instead, it all came from corporations, PACs, lobbyists, other politicians, parties, or people outside their districts. An additional 17 lawmakers received less than 1 percent of their money from constituents, essentially a pittance. The most that any lawmaker received from constituents was 22 percent, meaning that 78 percent of contributions still came from outside interests.

No question about who is really being represented. I wonder why I didn’t vote.

November 20, 2010

There’s been a big stink out here in true and only Family Land about the “nude scene” in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I. But, as usual, it has been blown way out of proportion. Imagine that. Turns out the nudity is implied. Daniel Radcliffe is shirtless, and Emma Watson wears a strapless bra. Both also wear silver paint to create a nightmare effect for Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint). They are seen in this state for about 3 seconds, with enough mist, smoke, and special-effects additions that any flashes of skin are obscured. And, while the movie is rated PG-13, "for some sequences of intense action violence, frightening images and brief sensuality", Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix also received that same rating. Those films, however, earned their ratings for violence and frightening images, so you couldn’t really get all in a lather to proclaim your self-righteousness for that. Too bad. Can’t have too many opportunities to show how righteous you are.

November 19, 2010

Former president W. came to a suburb of Salt Lake City today to sign copies of his “memoirs.” He didn’t appear at a bookstore, but at a Costco. About 60 of us got together in Pioneer Park in downtown Salt Lake City, about two blocks from my apartment and 15 miles from where he appeared, to protest the visit of the war criminal. Utah is very much a police state, and there’s no way any protesters would have been allowed within blocks of the signing. So, he didn’t get to see the signs saying "Torture Stains Everyone", "Worst President Ever", and "Arrest Bush." Some of the cars heading for the freeway honked. Rocky Anderson, former mayor of Salt Lake, was the main speaker. He said, among other things, that we and the entire world know that George Bush is a war criminal, that the stench of his presidency will hang over the country, wondered how soldiers can get prosecuted for torture while Bush can be warmly received in Sandy bragging about having said "damn right" when asked if he authorized torture, and said that since Obama has not acted to prosecute Bush, all Americans are complicit in his crimes. I’m not much for chanting and fist pumping, but I agree with all these things. However, no one mentioned his equally horrific crimes of destroying the American middle class, funneling tax dollars to his rich friends, creating the largest budget deficits in history, and enlarging the American security state to a size that will never be reduced. Makes me sick to even think about the damage his presidency has done. And it was depressing to see the pathetically small group of us.

November 18, 2010

It was a wonderful meal at Michaud’s after we got in; but when we had finished and there was no question of hunger any more the feeling that had been like hunger when we were on the bridge was still there when we caught the bus home. It was there when we came in the room and after we had gone to bed and made love in the dark, it was there. When I woke with the windows open and the moonlight on the roofs of the tall houses, it was there. I put my face away from the moonlight into the shadow but could not sleep and lay awake thinking about it. We had both wakened twice in the night and my wife slept sweetly now with the moonlight on her face. I had to try to think it out and I was too stupid. Life had seemed so simple that morning when I had wakened and found the false spring and heard the pipes of the man with his herd of goats and gone out and bought the racing paper. But Paris was a very old city and we were young and nothing was simple there, not even poverty, nor sudden money, nor moonlight, nor right and wrong nor the breathing of someone who lay beside you in the moonlight.

Ernest Hemingway
”A False Spring”

November 12, 2010

In 1991, Goldman Sachs decided that food might make an excellent investment. By then, nearly everything else had been recast as a financial abstraction that could generate wealth without risk, so the analysts transformed food. They selected eighteen commodifiable ingredients and contrived a financial elixir that included cattle, coffee, cocoa, corn, hogs, and a variety or two of wheat. They weighted the investment value of each element, blended and commingled the parts into sums, then reduced what had been a complicated collection of real things into a mathematical formula that could be expressed as a single manifestation known as the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index, and began to offer shares. This was a new form of commodities investment that eliminated the complexities of the commodities themselves. It allowed investors to park a great deal of money somewhere, then sit back and watch it grow, without any of the risk that the bankers themselves had introduced into the market. In fact, the mechanism of long and short selling, that had been created to stabilize food prices, now had been reassembled into a mechanism to inflate those prices. If the price of a commodity went up, Goldman made money, not only from management fees, but from the profits the bank pulled down by investing 95% of its clients money in less risky ventures. They even made money from the roll into each new contract, every instance of which required clients to pay a new set of transaction costs. As a result, the prices of all these “elements”, cattle, coffee, corn, wheat, etc., began to rise. And because it was successful, other bankers created their own food indexes as well. So, by the first quarter of 2008 transnational wheat giant Cargill attributed its 86% jump in annual profits to commodity trading. In fact, this global speculative frenzy in food commodities raised prices of food so dramatically that it sparked riots in more than thirty countries and drove the number of the world’s “food insecure” to more than a billion people. The ranks of the hungry had increased by more than 250 million in a single year, the most in all of human history. In reality, more than a billion people could no longer afford bread. The worldwide price of food had risen by 80 percent between 2005 and 2008, and unlike other food catastrophes of the past half century or so, even the United States was not insulated from it as 49 million Americans found themselves unable to put a full meal on the table. Across the country, demand for food stamps reached an all-time high, and one in five children came to depend on food kitchens. In Los Angeles, nearly a million people went hungry. In Detroit, armed guards stood watch over grocery stores. Even the New York Times and other mainstream media outlets admitted that rising food prices had, “played a role” in the catastrophe. And this year, the hedge fund manager of AIS Capital Management wrote that “the fundamentals argue strongly” that commodity prices could advance “460% above the mid-2008 price peaks.” That would put the price of a pound of ground beef at $20. When asked if he thought that were true, the chairman of the Minneapolis Grain Exchange responded, “absolutely.” This is what it means to leave “the market” unfettered: most of us are starved so 1% of the world’s population can become immeasurably more wealthy.

November 2, 2010

Today is election day. I have voted in every election since 1974, the first for which I was eligible (in those days when 18-year-old guys were being drafted to die in Vietnam, you had to be 21 years old to vote). I could have voted in 1972, but I was out of the country and had no concept of absentee balloting. Also, since I was a Mormon missionary at the time, I expect voting was against mission rules, at least for the people I would have voted for. So, today is really a first for me: I’m not voting. There are two primary reasons for my decision not to vote. First is that the political system has become so corrupt, politicians are owned completely by large donors, mainly large corporations, that voting has become meaningless. As Noam Chomsky has said, it is just Kabuki theatre to keep the people distracted. And second, there is no one even remotely close to my political views running. Minnesota is the State of Hockey, and Utah is the State of Conservative Posturing and Hypocrisy. Even the very few “Democrats” here are so conservative I get a rash just thinking about them. So, this is a sad and troubling day for me, and a sad and dangerous day for what the American political system has become. Is this a great country, or what?

November 1, 2010

Lewis Lapham on reading history and writing:
I soon discovered that I had as much to learn from the counsel of the dead as I did from the advice and consent of the living. The reading of history damps down the impulse to slander the trend and tenor of the times, instills a sense of humor, lessens our fear about what might happen tomorrow. On listening to President Barack Obama preach the doctrine of freedom-loving military invasion to the cadets at West Point, I'm reminded of the speeches that sent the Athenian army to its destruction in Sicily in 415 B.C., and I don't have to wait for dispatches from Afghanistan to suspect that the shooting script for the Pax Americana is a tale told by an idiot.

The common store of our shared history is what Goethe had in mind when he said that the inability to "draw on three thousand years is living hand to mouth." It isn't with symbolic icons that men make their immortality. They do so with what they've learned on their travels across the frontiers of the millennia, salvaging from the wreck of time what they find to be useful or beautiful or true. What preserves the voices of the great authors from one century to the next is not the recording device (the clay tablet, the scroll, the codex, the book, the computer, the iPad) but the force of imagination and the power of expression. It is the strength of the words themselves, not their product placement, that invites the play of mind and induces a change of heart.

Acknowledgment of the fact lightens the burden of mournful prophecy currently making the rounds of the media trade fairs. I listen to anguished publishers tell sad stories about the disappearance of books and the death of Western civilization, about bookstores selling cat toys and teddy bears, but I don't find myself moved to tears. On the sorrows of Grub Street the sun never sets, but it is an agony of Mammon, not a hymn to Apollo. The renders of garments mistake the container for the thing contained, the book for the words, the iPod for the music. The questions in hand have to do with where the profit, not the meaning, is to be found, who collects what tolls from which streams of revenue or consciousness. The same questions accompanied the loss of the typewriter and the Linotype machine, underwrote the digging of the Erie Canal and the building of Commodore Vanderbilt's railroads, the rigging of the nation's television networks and telephone poles, and I expect them to be answered by one or more corporate facilitators with both the wit and the bankroll to float the pretense that monopoly is an upgraded synonym for a free press, "prioritized" and "context sensitive," offering "quicker access to valued customers."

The more interesting questions are epistemological. How do we know what we think we know? Why is it that the more information we collect the less likely we are to grasp what it means? Possibly because a montage is not a narrative, the ear is not the eye, a pattern recognition is not a figure or a form of speech. The surfeit of new and newer news comes so quickly to hand that within the wind tunnels of the "innovative delivery strategies" the data blow away and shred. The time is always now, and what gets lost is all thought of what happened yesterday, last week, three months or three years ago. Unlike moths and fruit flies, human beings bereft of memory, even as poor a memory as Montaigne's or my own, tend to become disoriented and confused. I know no other way out of what is both the maze of the eternal present and the prison of the self except with a string of words.